After five months of development, the ARK Crew could not be more proud of the community that has sprung up in support of ARK. After getting to know all of you through testing, contests, and just chatting about life, we really do feel like you are part of the ARK family. That is why we felt it only fitting to break the news to you, our dedicated testers, friends, and strongest supporters first.

Our development team has given the green light for us to announce the official launch date of the ARK Mainnet.

The ARK network will come online at 1900 UTC on 21 March, 2017. This marks a major accomplishment for both our team and our community and we want to say THANK YOU for all of your hard work on testnet helping us to create the most stable, secure, and feature rich version of ARK yet. We always felt that creating a stable core release was more important than deadlines and we now have a client that is ready for primetime.

On March 21st everyone will be able to go to http://tec.ark.io and claim their ARK tokens by withdrawing them to your own personal ARK addresses. All wallets will need to be updated to the mainnet release version prior to the launch and will be available at http://ark.io.

Bounties will be added to the TEC website or will be manually processed AFTER the launch of ARK Mainnet. This is to give the ARK crew time to verify that the network is properly functioning before distribution.

While exchanges will be available during our initial launch period, we are unable to give additional details at this time. Please keep an eye out on ARK Slack Chat and our blog for exchange announcements during our mainnet launch.

We would like to thank the community for being patient and sticking with us. This is just the beginning of what will be an amazing year for ARK. Mainnet launch is just the first milestone on an expansive development roadmap that we plan to continue to refine as we move forward.

As always, thank you for being an ARK supporter. To keep up to date on everything ARK, read our Blog, hit us up on Slack, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and on March 21st, go buy some ARK!

Hi ARKers. Let us get right into it and discuss the updates that have taken place recently. First of all, 600+ slack members and counting. It seems the word is getting around about ARK and we are gaining traction with the public. Things are picking up and this is just the beginning guys. Things are starting to get exciting!

ARK Lite wallet release 0.1.0 is now livehttps://arkecosystem.github.io/ark-lite-wallet/app/
The Ark lite wallet is a simple to use web wallet that provides basic functionality like sending and receiving Ark cryptocurrency transactions. All delegate and voting will be done through the desktop wallet in the future but this lite wallet is the perfect solution for those that are on the go and don’t have access to their desktop client, but need to make a quick ARK transaction.

TESTNET - Fix has spent countless hours bug hunting and optimizing testnet. Latest reports have testnet screaming along at 5 transactions a second under sustained full load without glitches - AND any forks that popped up under extreme stress testing auto recovered! Currently we have been stress testing the network since the genesis block and have pushed out over 100,000 transactions in the first 10,000 blocks with very few issues.

After all of the extensive bug fixes, optimizations, and internal stress testing, we are confident that testnet will resume on Monday, February 13th. Woot Woot!

Last week we announced that the launch date would be pushed slightly to later in February. We would like to take this opportunity to talk a little bit more about why that is. With the latest testnet round, it became clear to the development team that there were a lot of underlying issues that could only be fixed by re-writing major portions of the core code.

For starters, the event management was not to our liking and could not simply be tweaked to function the way we believe is necessary or in a way we think makes sense. This requires a major rewrite to meet our standards and to make the network function how we envisioned. This is the case for several areas of the core code and is where most of our time and energy are currently focused.

Fixcrypt is completely rewriting the node management with a single point of entry that will deal with node state: (rebuilding, downloading blocks, broadcasting, forging etc…). It added a bit of work, but he is progressing well and we are seeing great results so far.

This rewrite of the legacy code will enable many improvements within the protocol.

Things in the pipeline:

Relay nodes (high level API access) and forging nodes (less API access + more security) are clearly separated.
Crazy fast rebuilding speed (because we are now able to mount the network interface only when being rebuilt…)
Broadcasting block headers only, since most of transactions are likely already received by all nodes before a block is forged.
Better block processing (no need to remove unconfirmed transactions that are included in the block).

Making changes to the protocol starting with the following:

No maximum block size
The only limitation on processing will be the # of transactions that the forging node can verify and include in less than blocktime/10

After these changes, the network will scale more directly with the power of the forging node hardware. That means when ARK mainnet launches, medium grade equipment may be good enough to run the network, but as we grow over the next year and beyond, delegates will definitely be required to run more robust hardware to keep the network going strong. More details on recommended specs will be available once we have had a chance to test the capabilities of the new code.

A new internal testnet version will be pushed out early this week. We will need a few days to monitor performance before we roll that version out to the main testnet group in our ARK slack. Things are moving fast and a complete rewrite of a major part of the ARK core needs to be done right. We won’t release until we have conducted a thorough and productive open testnet period of all of these changes.

The only bad thing about ARK being on the apple store, is you have to wait for the new testnet release this week to use it.

That’s all for week 6. Stay tuned for more updates - and remember to join our slack to always be up to date with latest news / development or if you have any questions or concerns we are there to help : https://ark.io/join-ark-slack/